This Hololens Tech Brings Us One Step Closer to Star Wars Holograms

When I watched Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time as a five-year-old, my face looked like O_O for two straight hours. Spaceships! Lightsabers! Robots! But one piece of future that wormed its way even deeper into my brain was the Millennium Falcon’s holographic monster mash chess game, aka Dejarik. It was the coolest.

This was how I wanted to play games always and forever—not trapped within the limited frame of my television—and Microsoft agrees with me. With its new Hololens 3D experiment, Microsoft details its motion capture process, using 106 RGB and infrared cameras on a green screen backdrop to create what Microsoft calls “high quality, free viewpoint video.”

So yeah, basically Dejarik. Here’s the technical mumbo jumbo of how this all comes together:

In many ways, that just sounds like good ole mo-capping, except instead of gathering data and then building a 3D model, Microsoft’s technique is way more efficient and just captures and makes the model at the same time.

Looking at those mind-blowing Minecraft Hololens demos, a new generation of UI and gaming seems to be quickly approaching, so let me give you your first piece of advice: Let the Wookie win.